A new sport is coming to West Cumbria this week.
Racquet Club 24 opens its doors on Wednesday in Workington and brings padel to Cumbria for the first time.
Padel is a racquet sport that uses the same scoring conventions as lawn tennis but is played on smaller courts enclosed by walls. It has around 30 million players worldwide and fans include Serena Williams and David Beckham.
It has never been more popular and now Bill Dixon is opening Racquet 24 on St Helen’s Business Par, opposite Dunmail Park.
Featuring four courts in a converted unit, it has been almost a year in the making and began as a chance remark by one of Bill’s friends.
Bill said: “We were thinking about bringing the unit back into use and a friend said to me ‘have you thought about leisure?’ It was a text from him that suggested padel and that set us on the road.”
The club is pay and play – people simply download an app and book the court – they can either book it as a foursome or the app will put together quartets of players.
Bill said: “We wanted to make it as easy as possible for people to come and play – there’s no membership fees, they can just rent a court or book a time.”
The courts installed are of an international standard and Bill said he has already been approached by a team from Spain who want to organise a padel camp over half term.
Padel racquets don’t have strings and the rules have slight differences to regular tennis.
It is fastest growing sport in the world and Bill is hopeful that people will be interested to pop along and give padel a try. He said it was a very tactical game and he had already had interest from tennis players locally.
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